Control Your Attention, Create Your Life

For years, management experts have studied time management. There are a thousand tips: batch your emails, protect focused time, plan your day before getting started. All useful. But Vistage speaker Maura Thomas draws a more fundamental distinction.

The issue isn’t time management. It’s attention management.

Consider two people: Joe pays attention to becoming a better sax player and couldn’t care less about skiing. Joanna focuses on becoming a better skier and has never touched a musical instrument. When they leave this world, their lives will consist of the accumulation of all their experiences. Joe’s reality will contain no skiing; Joanna’s will contain no saxophone. Their lives are, in fact, the sum total of what they decided to pay attention to.

Simple at first. But as we move through our days, we don’t always pay attention to what we’re paying attention to. We fight fires that aren’t actually important. We tolerate poor behavior rather than addressing it. We forget to call the people who matter.

Stephen Covey’s Big Rocks principle captures it: the Important and Not Urgent keeps getting crowded out by the Urgent and Not Important. Until we stop and put the big rocks in first.

One practical tip from Maura: no one would try to solve a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces in separate rooms — you’d gather them all together first, then work. Similarly, stop keeping your tasks in separate places: Post-it notes, emails, voice messages, Slack threads, your head. Get them all into one place. Then prioritize.

That way, you can pay attention to what’s actually worth paying attention to. And create your life as you go.